So I haven't been running since last summer, really, because I fucked up my foot. It started hurting when I ran, and then I rested it and got better, and did a trail half, and it started hurting more, and then I did a book tour and walked a lot in dressy shoes, and it hurt even more, and after Worldcon I tried to run 5K with some intervals and as a result was laid up on the couch for two weeks in agony. I saw my doctor and she thought it was Achilles tendinitis: "Rest it and stretch it."

Well, it seemed to be getting better slowly. And then I danced on New Year's Eve and the next day I couldn't walk. I'm a pretty tough girl, and I was in so much pain I had to hop to the bathroom.

So, to make a long story short, I saw an orthopedic surgeon yesterday, and there's very good news: the x-rays are fine, and there's no tendon or bone damage requiring surgery. What I do have is very, very tight calf muscles, which is probably half the fact that I live and run in a really hilly goddamned place, and half that I got slack about my yoga practice starting last year.

The calf muscles pull on the Achilles tendon and the plantar fascia, causing... excruciating pain in my foot!

So I got a cortisone shot (Jiminy Christmas, that hurt. I had one in my bum shoulder before and it was no big deal: this one was fucking agony) and a PT routine, and permission to resume exercise and activity as my pain levels permit.

Er. Once I'm over the pneumonia. You know.

If the PT doesn't work, he says, they can surgically lengthen my calf muscle. So... I think I'm going to try to pick up the pace with my yoga practice.

This does triple duty in preventing us from fixing our own lives and also from changing the world for the better. Because it is exhausting for us, and it's exhausting for our friends, and it's a bad model for others.

Think of all the emotional energy you've devoted, over the years, to self-loathing. Think of all the emotional energy you've devoted to supporting beloved friends who are perfect in every way except they keep slashing themselves to ribbons. Think of everything you could have accomplished if you hadn't told yourself that you weren't good enough, that you didn't deserve anything, that you'd better play Paul Atreides and destroy the thing you really wanted because it was the only way you had any control over it at all.

And the thing is, that self-abnegation shit is all lies. Really it is. 90% of women are not nearly as awful as they think they are, which is a statistic that I made up on the spot.

(05% of all people are actually horrible people, but the horrible people never think they're horrible, which enables them to be as awful as they are. I'm not talking to those people here. They're already not kicking themselves.)

So I'm speaking specifically to the non-horrible-person cis-female self-kickers when I say: the thing is, when we kick ourselves, when we marginalize ourselves, when we erase ourselves, when we look for evidence everywhere of failure and ignore the evidence of success, when we reinforce those toxic opinions of ourselves... we're not just hurting ourselves.

We're totally hurting ourselves, because we believe the horrible things we say about ourselves, and internalize them, and we feel like we have no right to have desires or take up space or want things, especially if they are things other people want too. And the thing is, yes, sometimes life is a competition. And sometimes you lose.

You don't accomplish more by holding yourself to an impossible, inhuman standard. You don't have to slash yourself to ribbons over it. That's actually not healthy.

And when we do it, we're hurting other women too. (All other women, not just cis women.) Because we're reinforcing the cultural expectation that women will be self-effacing and self-denigrating. That we'll step out of the way and make room. That our only value is in how useful we are to others, and that we'll go meekly to the ice floe when we're not immediately useful anymore.

And often when we try to quit kicking ourselves, our friends seem to kick themselves even harder. Which reasserts the social norm that kicking yourself is the way it's done, and also models self-kicking as a behavior pattern for younger women. (I also think there's a whole complex of toxic behaviors that tie in here, such as guilt-tripping and manipulation, because basically what we're doing is institutionalizing ourselves, and robbing ourselves of agency, and there are well-documented toxic ways that institutionalized people behave when they feel like they have no control over their lives.)

So obviously, we all need to quit hitting ourselves AT THE SAME TIME for this to work!

I'm not saying there's no room for self-improvement in anybody, mind you. I know I sure as hell have room in my life for personal growth. It's why I have a nice therapist I talk to on Monday mornings, after all. But I am saying that savaging yourself over it doesn't actually produce that growth.

Anybody who has ever had a dog will tell you that you don't actually get results out of any given organism by beating it silly. You get them by rewarding the behavior you want. Positive reinforcement works. Abuse just makes a creature neurotic and less capable, not more.

And since we're adults here, we are responsible for our own training. Quit hitting yourself.

A major watershed in my adult life was the moment when coffeeem, with the sort of profound wisdom a big sister occasionally hands down, said to me, "You wouldn't let anybody talk to me the way you talk to yourself." It literally changed my life, because she was right. So why do we regularly talk to ourselves in ways we wouldn't ever talk to our friends?*

So here's my challenge for February of 2016. I'm going to quit kicking myself. If I screw up I'm going to figure out why it happened and try to fix it. If I do something positive I'm going to give myself a sticker. In fact, I'm going to give myself a sticker every time I'm tempted to cut myself and don't.

So there. No kicking yourself.

And no autocannibalism either.

**(I fully acknowledge that I'm not equipped to speak directly to the experience of transwomen, and I don't wish to be exclusionary. Also, I know that some men also experience these feelings, but they seem less prevalent. Men are more often socialized to believe they deserve to exist and want things.)

*And if you do talk to your friends that way, you're one of the horrible people, and this post is not for you.

Hey there internauts. Welcome back to the re-emerging chronicle of my rebooted life. Tomorrow morning, I get up and go to see a sports medicine dude about my Achilles tendon, which has been seriously cramping my style since June and, after the manner of tendons, just refuses to heal. (My heel won't heal! O Noes!) This has, needless to say, been having an extremely detrimental effect on my running and dancing and basically everything cardiovascular I enjoy doing.

The climbing was going pretty well, and the weight-lifting, before the pneumonia thing started. But curiously, it's hard to squat 200 when you're coughing up alien civilizations and your toes, so when I come back to it, I expect to be significantly deloaded. *dogsigh*

But I didn't come here to talk about sports injuries. I came here to talk about the problem of my writer brain. Which is, more or less, I've realized that writing stopped being fun at all immediately after I attended a pro-level workshop in 2007 (there was so much else going on in my life at the time that I didn't actually connect the two things until later) and turned into an exercise in willpower, grim determination, and consciously applied craft and skill and technique.

I got a lot better from thinking about it so much. But I also got a bit like the centipede that gets around just fine until somebody asks him how he rums.

So here I am with 62 pairs of red Converse All-Stars and the laces are a hopeless knot.

I was getting through basically by gutting it out for quite a while: I'm a very stubborn girl, and I can do an amazing amount on willpower and discipline. The thing is, well, somewhere in the middle of that second draft of An Apprentice to Elves, well. Something just kind of snapped. Went sproing. And the gears have been grinding louder and louder ever since.

Add that to a moderate case of overwork and burnout, and....

So I have to figure out how to relax and trust myself again, I guess. To actually engage with the stories on a level of feeling excited by them and enjoying them, instead of wading through oceans of self-loathing to get there. As regular readers of this journal will recall, all of this is of course gorgeously complicated by a really exciting history of complex PTSD, some of which has gotten kicked to the fore again recently by some triggery happenings...

Basically, I'm in the ridiculous position of having the job I always wanted, a job I love and am good at... and not being able to do it because I'm too busy second-guessing myself.

Which is why the deadline stuff is getting pushed back a bit, so I can have some breathing space and try to get rid of some of this pile of "should" and turn it into "want to" without the hyper-critical selfconsciousness and feelings of being overwhelmed and scraped thin.

But it's February 1st, which is when I told myself I'd get back on the horse, and I've printed out some short fiction I'm poking at, and I'm going to see what I can start doing with it in as relaxed a fashion as possible.

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is authenticity, finding your voice, finding your self. And it's such a tricky topic--in art as it is in life. Because we all have aspirations (I hope we all have aspirations!): better selves, the person who we want to be, the change we want to see in the world. The artist we want to become.

I'm a terrible guitarist and singer. I do it for fun, and I refuse to take it terribly seriously, because I know what happens when I take art seriously: it starts to become a stressor, a thing I worry and fret about, a thing I become perfectionist over. But I still like doing it, and I still practice new things, and I have some vague aspirations to take singing lessons when I'm doing a little less traveling.

I did not, however, really learn to sing at all until I was in my late thirties. And a lot of this was because I didn't learn to stop struggling with the voice I thought I should have (I wish I had a lovely, smoky contralto) and be comfortable with my own voice until then. (I have a very high singing voice, and I don't like it very much. But I like singing, so I work with what I have, I suppose.) I kept trying to make my voice into something that it wasn't, into what I thought it ought to be, and that prevented me from working with what I did have and making it better.

This principle applies to writing, as well. And, well, life. You have a voice, as an artist and as a human being. That voice is part of who you are, and it's comprised of your core beliefs, your internalizations, your hopes and dreams and influences and experiences.

You can develop it. You can make it better. But until you find it--until you find that authentic voice, and accept it, and begin working on making it stronger and trusting it and letting it shine through--you will always sound artificial and affected.

And there's a reason we call it "finding your voice," and not "creating your voice." The voice is there. Whatever it is, you are stuck with it. So you might as well learn to like it, and work with it, and improve it.

And when broadened out to life, this involves being who you are, rather than who you think you ought to be.

And sometimes that's hugely painful or difficult, especially when we've been socialized to believe that who we are, deep down, is somehow immoral and incorrect. Because the first thing you have to figure out is who you are. And what you want. And that it's all right for you to want and be those things, even if somebody else told you it was wrong. Even if it's risky. Even if your family might not understand. (Of course, it's also risky because it might involve important relationships changing drastically, giving up things that are precious to you, and re-assessing your investments or renegotiating your life path.)

That can be a tremendously painful process, this letting go of what you thought you ought to be, what you were invested in being--and just being what you are. Feeling your feelings, Writing your words. Making your art, which involves telling your truths.

And it's tricky! It's so tricky! Because it involves determining what is an unrealistic desire for a thing we aren't (I want to be a contralto) but not accepting limits that don't have a foundation is reality, but only in our own fears and risk-aversion (I don't have a voice at all and shouldn't try to sing).

That learning process is part of the path to authenticity. And authenticity and saying what you mean and observing honestly, inside and out, is where we find art. Actual art.

And I think it's also part of the way out of anxiety, because anxiety arises from internal conflict (fear vs. desire, or incompatible desires, or desire vs. obligation). And if we don't learn who we really are and what we really have to say, we can't make honest art, and we can't actually accept ourselves and learn to sing as best we can with what we have.

Because we're too busy trying to imitate somebody else, or be what somebody else expects us to be, or be what we've been trained to believe we ought to be.

This is also, a lot of the time, when we're wasting a lot of energy trying to control somebody else's life or choices or art, because is we are insecure in our own choices, we feel challenged when somebody else makes a different choice, and we thus try to invalidate the thing that challenges us. Denial is a hell of a drug. The classic example, of course, is the unhappily married person trying to matchmake all of their friends. Or the guy who complains about books that have adverbs in them, because they have internalized some weird advice from some book on writing that you should never use an adverb.

Hey guys. So, it has been.... well, a long time since my last significant blogging here. It's been an interesting autumn and winter on a lot of fronts, and I've been getting my head sorted, and I haven't felt much like talking about most of it on the internets. Also, you know, I've been trying to do more stuff that is Not On The Internets.

But I'm feeling a little more like crawling out of my hole, so. THE STATE OF THE BEAR ADDRESS.

First item: Hey guess what, I have pneumonia! Or really bad bronchitis. I'm apparently right on the cusp between. Probably the same bug that's laid out half of science fiction. According to my wonderful nurse practitioner, there's a chest cold going around that produces really thick mucus and doesn't make you cough enough, and combined with dessication from dry winter air this means your lungs turn into Petrie dishes for any passing bacterium. Result: minor epidemic of pneumonia in fairly young, otherwise healthy people.

So if you find yourself with a chest cold that doesn't seem too bad, don't be me. Take an expectorant and use a humidifier.

This is especially frustrating because it's gorgeous out--we're so far having a lovely mild winter in Massachusetts--and I want to exercise, but I'm grounded. I haven't been able to run since last summer because of Achilles tendinitis (slowly getting better. slowly.) but I was making good progress again with rock climbing, weight lifting, and yoga. And now I'm going to have to deload again, dammit.

Second item: Yes, my website is down. I am having ISP issues, and I need to figure out a new hosting solution and do a website redesign to support the current and forthcoming frontlist, which consists of Karen Memory, the Eternal Sky world, and the White Space world. I apologize.

It may be a little while before I figure out what my solution is, because I am also in the middle of moving house and planning a wedding. Ahem. It turns out these things are time consuming.

Third item: Yes, Scott and I are buying a house and doing some other legal paperwork. Here's to the end of five years of commuter relationship. Expect kitten pictures sooner or later.

Fourth item: The Giant Ridiculous Dog says hello. He's getting on in years, but still happy and healthy and enjoying his walks.

In other news, (way to bury the lede Bear) it may also be a little while before there is another novel-length Elizabeth Bear book.

I've been talking with my agent and editors, and I'm going to be on a bit of a novel sabbatical this year. Some of this is the moving and house-buying and wedding planning (good gravy, mortgages are a lot of work). Some of it is that I have been working nonstop and flat-out for fourteen years, and, well, I'm struggling to figure out what I want to say and how to say it and to find interesting human stories I haven't already told from several angles.

The plots are not the issue, nor the worlds. The art of inventing new and interesting characters, however, has deserted me. And I have become like the centipede who has been asked how he runs: I'm in a state where I am extremely critical of and self-conscious about my own work, and it's making it really hard to produce anything on a reasonable schedule. Since I respond to deadline pressure with self-loathing and despair, the best solution I can come up with at this point is to back the pressure off a little and try to fix my brain and creativity, because pushing through is just making things worse and I don't want to actually break myself.

Also, the success of Karen and the Eternal Sky books has been awesome, and I'm thrilled that they are getting the love and attention that they are. But I am having a hard time learning to balance the additional demands on my time with the need to actually produce new work. Which is part of why I have been spending less time on the internets: I need to assess priorities and figure out what my workflow is going to be in the future.

Aaaaaand I'm also in treatment for some anxiety and the burnout issues, and that's taking up a lot of my creative focus. <<wry face>>

(It's embarrassing to talk about, but you know, nobody actually benefits when we don't talk about mental and emotional health issues, so here goes.)

I am working on a couple of shorter pieces, though--I'm hoping that if I take a little time for myself and give myself a little breathing room, I'll grown back a little bit. So I'm not making any public commitments about those.

This is slightly delayed today, because that boy I like and I were kind of buying a house. Ahem.

***

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

“Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

“So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

In much much happier news, I'm going to talk about some books I love now.

These are things I have read in the past couple of years that are really, really good.

My Real Children, by papersky (Jo Walton), which is a great book about a woman living two lives in parallel but different timestreams. I have a quibble with the ending, but that's literally my only quibble with the book. There was a thing in the last paragraph that made me go "Huh?" So good, so gorgeously written, so understated, so completely a thing that could never be written in another genre.

The Goblin Emperor, by truepenny (Katherine Addison), just came in second in the Hugo Best Novel award. It's about a young man growing up in exile who is awakened in the middle of the night to be told that his entire family has been assassinated and he's going to have to be Emperor of the Elves now. There only problem is that he has no training at all, and his mother was a goblin.

The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne, is about two women traveling great distances in different times, whose lives are joined by one unspeakable moment of violence. It's so good, you guys. The writing is top notch and the characters are prickly and weird and unreliable narrators and it's compelling as hell.

The Peripheral, by William Gibson. Apparently I am on a roll with parallel-story novels, because this is another one with two threads of narrative that weave together synthetically. It's great: I think this is Gibson's best novel, and it's a crying shame it didn't make the Hugo ballot this year. It has gunfights and philosophy in about equal measure, and it blew my socks off.

Updraft, by Fran Wilde, comes out on Tuesday. It's super, one of the best first novels I've read in a long time. It's about a girl who cannot follow orders to save her life trying to make her way through a perilous society where people live at the top of living bone towers and travel with wings. There are creepy monsters and secret societies and this protagonist who just cannot stop making things worse for herself.

Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho. Also a new novelist, this is a Regency-era thriller with sorcery duels and brutal politics. It's wacky and madcap while also being quite tense. I was reminded of those Cary Grant/Kate Hepburn screwball comedies in the way things just escalate and escalate.

Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I've been hand-selling this book to everybody who will sit still for it. It's subtle and generous and witty and heartbreaking and I loved it to absolute death. And I have a critical allergy to Romans.

Of Noble Family, by Mary Robinette Kowal. The final book in her glamourist histories, this does an excellent job of kicking the coprotagonists Jane and Vincent out of their comfort zone and sending them out into a wider and more difficult world. These books have been moving from strength to strength, and portions of this one are serious nailbiters.

A World of Trouble, by Ben H. Winters. Last book in a trilogy, and all three of them are very good. The protagonist is a guy who was a cop in a world with an impending calamity--and extinction-event level meteor strike--hanging over it. He's trying to be a decent human being and do decent human being things, like take care of his sister. Mystery, action, characterization--all great.

Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein. Oh my gosh just read this book it will knock your socks off. I made the mistake of listening to it on audiobook, and I'm sure the neighbors thought I was a fucking lunatic, walking the dog with headphones in and snot and tears running down my face while I sobbed and sobbed.

California Bones, by Greg Van Eekhout. This is a thrillery book about a young guy whose dad was a sorcerer, and who is attempting to navigate a magical underworld where all the sorcerers hang out and compete for power. It's like Tim Powers meets The Wire. I loved it.

Elizabeth Bear's How To Title Your Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel or Series: A Tutorial in Three Parts*

(*In which I make fun of my industry, myself, and all of my friends.)

Part the Oneth: STRUCTURING YOUR TITLE

There are a number of excellent titling strategies. For purposes of this column, we're going to ignore some of the strategies requiring a little more art and discretion, such as extracting a suitable bit of a quotation from something (A Fine and Private Place), its ever-popular subset, making up a quote, sticking it in the book, and then quoting yourself (as in my own All the Windwracked Stars), or just titling a story after the protagonist (Julian Comstock) with or without suitable subtitles.

The simplest titling strategy is, of course, the single unadorned NOUN. Usually one-syllable, for best impact and biggest title type, but not always: (Dawn. Dune. Dust. Skin. Sunshine. ) Can also be a PROPER NOUN--the "Title the story after the protagonist" tactic above is a subset of this-- ("Galapagos." Alanna.Cyteen, Hyperion)--in fairness, Sunshine, Dune, and Dust are also proper nouns, but they have evocative meanings of their own--or a date (1984, 2312) or even the ever-popular DEFINITE ARTICLE NOUN (The Peripheral. The Chaos.).

Also fun, pick a FOREIGN NOUN! (Idoru, Accelerando)

There's also the COINED NOUN appearing in all subforms, super popular in SFF if you can come up with a catchy word. (UBIK. Slan.)and there's the ever-popular SLIGHTLY TWEAKED NOUN (or existing construction)(Neuromancer. Streetlethal. "The Narcomancer." Doomsday Book)

If you come up with a good one of these, your friends will be jealous forever. Just so you know.

There's also the NOUN NOUN, but since those usually read as ADJECTIVE NOUN, they're dealt with below. Just find a noun that encompasses some thematic or descriptive aspect of your work, and go to town!

...But this is beginner stuff. We can do better than that.

NB: the one-word title often indicates science fiction, as opposed to fantasy. As does the next subset, the ADJECTIVE NOUN.

The ADJECTIVE NOUN title comes in two subforms, of course: ADJECTIVE NOUN proper and the slightly more common ARTICLE ADJECTIVE NOUN. This gets interesting, because I feel through entirely subjective anecdata that ADJECTIVE NOUN (occasionally ADJECTIVENOUN) usually indicates a genre book (Lady Knight, Conjure Wife, Blue Mars, Starship Troopers, Snow Crash, Lifelode, Updraft) whereas DEFINITE ARTICLE ADJECTIVE NOUN (The Broken Kingdoms. The Forever War, The Snow Queen, The Goblin Emperor, The Three-Body Problem, Ancillary Mercy, The Drowning City, The Invisible Man, The Fortunate Fall, The Illustrated Man, The Orphan Queen) could go either way, and INDEFINITE ARTICLE ADJECTIVE NOUN says literary novel to me. In fact, the only genre examples I can think of off the top of my head is A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and that one throws in an adverb for good measure.

I'm sure there are more, but thinking about them is too far to go for a joke.

These work best if you can come up with some interesting tension in the name--two things that evoke an image, or seem in contradiction to one another, as in The Fortunate Fall and The Orphan Queen above.

We're just going to conveniently ignore The Scarlet Letter in this discussion.

This is one of the true classics of genre titling, by the way. In a statistic I just made up on the spot, I would estimate that 78.3% of genre books have some subvariant of the ADJECTIVE NOUN construction. (You can also jazz it up by going NOUN ADJECTIVE, too (Man Plus. Girl, Interrupted. I think Boneshaker probably goes under NOUN, but whatever. you get the idea.).

We also get some variants here--POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVE NOUN (My Real Children) and the ADJECTIVE NOUN'S NOUN construction with variants (Ender's Game, The Wise Man's Fear, Old Man's War, Delia's Shadow), but the basic structure is the same, though they can be a little snappier because they impart a little more action and context.

Then there's a weirdo: the unadorned ADJECTIVE VERB FORM. I think I might actually have started that one, with Hammered, but now it's everywhere--including at least a couple of other Hammereds, some Hunteds, the odd Withered and Divergent... and so it goes. Trendy now, may sound dated in a decade. Or it may be one that sticks around.

They don't pay me to be a titling futurist. Except indirectly.

Oh wait, I take it back. Kindred. That might be the ur-adjective. That one's not verb-derived, though, so it doesn't sound so weird when you think about it for too long. Possibly Octavia Butler was better at this than I am.

***I can't think of any genre examples. Oh, wait, fadethecat came up with Consider Phlebas, which is also a quote, and I can't believe I forgot.

Next up, another real classic of the genre title: the ever popular NOUN & NOUN! A serious classic of fantasy in particular. Does what it says on the box. (Blood & Iron. Rosemary and Rue. Cloud and Ashes. The Moon and the Sun. We could be here all week.)

And now, the one you've all been waiting for--the real standard marker of heroic or epic fantasy. The dreaded and all too easy to mock THING PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE title. This is totally J.R.R. Tolkien's fault, and there's no use pretending otherwise.

The Name of the WindIll-Met in LankhmarA Stranger in OlondriaA Companion to WolvesGun, with Occasional MusicServant of the UnderworldWizard of the PigeonsThe Grace of KingsThe Lies of Locke Lamora (extra credit for protagonist name)The Face in the FrostSometimes, for variety, just a prepositional phrase! By the Mountain Bound

And you can make a series sound unified--and endlessly confuse your readers when they try to remember which book is which--by taking two Common Fantasy Nouns, working them into a prepositional phrase, and changing only one of them per series installment. I think the first time I encountered this trick was the Janny Wurts/Ray Feist "Empire" books (Daughter of, Servant of, Mistress of, if I remember, but I can never remember which order they come in. And I Liked them and read them more than once.)

Ahem. Anyway. Now that you have the constructions, you need some words to plug in. Feel free to use as many as you like. And convert them into adjectives or adverbs as needed.... for example, Blood to Bloody.

These are all great well-recognized Fantasy Nouns, and using them on a book cover will make sure that readers know what they're getting!

And now, for extra credit, some titles that mix things up! See if you can figure out how these were done.

Red Seas under Red SkiesBell Book and CandleWho Fears DeathSet this House in OrderSearch the Seven Hills Kitty and the Midnight HourQueen of Air and DarknessThree Hearts and Three LionsStormqueen! (Exclamation points are rarely a good idea in titles, and this one is no exception)

THE NOUN WHO VERBED (The Epithet Title): (The Man who Melted. The Woman who Rides Like a Man. The Man Who Wasn't There.)

Hello, true believers! I know, I know. It's like I never come around here any more. I've been caught up in travel and work and more travel and more work--but I have some actual exciting announcements to make.

My hopefully amusing short story, "The Bone War," is out in this month's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, fondly known throughout the genre as "F&SF." The table of contents and some links to reviews are here. It's a Bijou the Artificer story, set in the Eternal Sky world some four hundred years after Range of Ghosts and on a different continent. It is lovingly dedicated to all my academic friends.

Pursuant to that, I would like to announce that forthcoming in Year 2 of Uncanny (kickstarter here for subscription and cool premiums), you will see the publication of my novelette "And the Balance in Blood." This is one part more academic snark and one part what happens to AD&D characters when they retire. As one does.

You may have heard that my writing partner, Sarah Monette, was nominated for literally every single major fantasy genre award this year in her Katherine Addison persona, for The Goblin Emperor. She won the Locus Award for best fantasy novel, and is in the running for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards.

My least favorite writing advice today is the old "cut your first drafts by 10-15%" canard, which seems to be making another round.

You know what? It's great advice for some writers, with some stories. But like all one-size-fits-all advice, it actually doesn't necessarily fit most very well.

Me, for example. My first drafts tend to grow by 10-20% on redraft, because I tend to write my first drafts without things like transitions, exposition, dialogue, dramatization, and setup for thematic developments. They're more or less nothing except plot and character development, and all the other stuff gets put in later. I also have to insert white space a lot of the time, because at novel length extremely dense narrative becomes exhausting, and that's what I naturally tend towards.

My earliest decent short stories were all around 1500-3000 words. It wasn't until I learned to unpack those, to get the interesting bits out of my head and trust that I wasn't going to make them boring by explaining them, to write them at 5000-7000 words for the same sorts of ideas, that they started selling well and attracting positive comment.

I've several times shown my students the first draft of "Shoggoths in Bloom" as well as the published version. The story won a Hugo in its longer, published version. The first draft was largely opaque and hasty, and I know this for a fact, because I took it to Sycamore Hill and sat in a room while a dozen of my colleagues told me exactly how much of it was incomprehensible twaddle.

(Not always: sometimes I need to cut things. But it's incredibly rare for that to happen, and feel free to ask my editors.)

In my experience as a teacher of writing--going on ten years of it now--this is true for a good third of my students, as well. Some of whom have struggled extensively because of this advice, which gets parroted around as if it were true for everyone, all the time.

It's not. Just as the advice to "expand that--dramatize that--explain that better" is not true for everyone all the time.

(In point of fact, I suspect that there are no generally applicable answers even for particular writers. Sometimes we'll overwrite, and sometimes we'll underwrite, and experience and good editors will eventually teach us which is which.)

The trick is not to apply some magic metric like "Oh, cut 10% of everything you write." The trick is to learn what information is necessary and what information is not, and provide the former--and as much of the latter as is entertaining and fun.

So, today, May 15th, 2015, a day which happens to be my mother's 63rd birthday, the jury in the Tsarnaev bombing trial sentenced a young man to die.

I live here.

Not in Boston. no. But in the Bay State. I'm in town once or twice a month. I'll never be fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon, but I run. I have friends who were there when it happened.

When the attack happened, I was at my partner's house, which is in Wisconsin, and I spent... days... following the unfolding events.

What I'm saying is this is my back yard.

I have lost family members to murder. I am opposed to the death penalty nevertheless, for a variety of reasons I don't feel like discussing here.

This hurts. This all hurts. This isn't the decision I think should have been made. But I am proud of my home for bringing this man in alive, and for providing due process and a civil trial (and there was pressure to do it otherwise.) I am also, simultaneously, deeply saddened that we have chosen a course that I think reflects lingering barbarism in our society.

85% of Boston residents would have preferred a life sentence, and so would I. Even understanding that it would have had to have been a life sentence in protective custody, which amounts to a life sentence in solitary confinement.

Is that more humane than death?

I don't know.

I do know that I am not one of the twelve people who will have to live with the decision that was made today, and I know also that I am a coward, because I am grateful for that fact.

The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the top five finalists in each category of the 2015 Locus Awards.

Winners will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, June 26-28, 2015; Connie Willis will MC the awards ceremony. Additional weekend events include author readings with Willis and Daryl Gregory; a kickoff Clarion West party honoring first week instructor Andy Duncan, Clarion West supporters, awards weekend ticket holders, and special guests; panels with leading authors; an autograph session with books available for sale thanks to University Book Store; and a lunch banquet with the annual Hawai’ian shirt contest, all followed by a Locus party on Saturday night.

“Tough Times All Over”, Joe Abercrombie (Rogues)“The Hand Is Quicker”, Elizabeth Bear (The Book of Silverberg)“Memorials”, Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s 1/14)“The Jar of Water”, Ursula K. Le Guin (Tin House #62)“A Year and a Day in Old Theradane”, Scott Lynch (Rogues)SHORT STORY

I've just finished reading Jeff Guinn's The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West.

He's got a really aggravating tendency to claim an understanding of motives and leave out words like "perhaps," "probably," and "allegedly" that should be liberally sprinkling this text, and he's got that annoying tendency that many male historians and biographers of generally lionized male historical figures have of getting all possessive of his boyfriends and either dismissing the women in their lives as insignificant, hysterical, clutching, or entirely out for the main chance; or of editorializing on how irritating their men must have found them.

Also, I quibble some with his description of the forensics of the infamous gunfight (this is one of those places where "perhaps" would have come in really handy), especially as he misses my pet theory about how Tom McLaury managed to take a load of shotgun pellets in the armpit (my favorite reconstruction of the fight has the unarmed Tom reaching over the saddle of Billy Clanton's horse to retrieve Clanton's rifle from the saddle sheath, and being dragged around in a circle when the horse spooks, thus exposing his side and underarm to Doc), but at least Guinn does point out that it's pretty implausible for Doc to have put down the shotgun, pulled his revolver, shot Billy Clanton in cold blood, picked the shotgun back up, killed Tom with it, then dropped the shotgun and picked up the pistol and proceeded to miss Frank in the <30 seconds of the entire fight.

However, the book is pretty impressive on historical context and backstory, and presents one of the clearer pictures of the tapestry of interwoven motivations, politics, social considerations, and economics that drove the tensions in Southeast Arizona at the time.

Guinn also makes really good sense of the stagecoach robberies, and rightly points out that gunfight was the top of the second act in this particular narrative, and not the climax at all. (The actual climax is kind of an anticlimax, as is so common the real world and why the end of the story gets rewritten when it's fictionalized for film. Curly Bill and John Ringo have to be foregrounded a heck of a lot more, and Ike Clanton kicked back to his admittedly rightful place as a second-stringer for something closer to the real world narrative to work as a story.)

What we learn from the lives of the Earp brothers, in the end, is if you have to be an Earp, be James. Live quietly and more or less without notoriety, show up for work, and die in your 80s in bed, contented and comfortably well off.

What we learn from the lives of historians of the Matter of Tombstone is that anybody who wades through the John H. Flood manuscript of Wyatt's memoirs deserves hazard pay. You can read the PTSD between the lines in every single account that mentions it.

A representative sample:

Earp could feel the warmth of the conspirator's body as he leaned against him; the pulsations beat against his own and then there was a throb; something that felt like nerves, and the tenseness of muscles at the drawing of a gun. Earp was watching Allison and the movement of his forty-five; gradually, it was slipping forward from its holster while the marshal stood silently and looked on.

Now the assassin's thumb reached towards the hammer - quietly - then he felt a thrill, something that made his side turn cold, the side against that of the city marshal. Then he raised his eyes to another pair of eyes, and flinched, and dropped his gaze to the ground; he saw a movement at his side and he thought his end had come. Earp was two seconds ahead of him on the draw, and Allison knew that he had lost his play, and he edged out onto the walk...